Thank you, Madame Demers.
I'd like to start with your question on women's representation. In 1999 we celebrated grandly when 37% of the Scottish Parliament members were women in the new institution, very much part of the new politics of Scotland that had been a core feature of the campaign for devolution itself. The 50-50 campaign that was run by the trade unions and some of the political parties was very much in that spirit of new politics. We had high hopes that not just the physical presence of women but that an apparently more open attitude to gender politics would come to prevail in the Parliament.
Certainly in structural terms some changes did occur. The working areas of the Parliament are structured around school hours and school term times, and there is a crèche and child care facility in the Parliament, which unsurprisingly has come under regular threat of closure as it's not seen as an integral part.
However, nine years on from devolution, the number of women in the Scottish Parliament has fallen in successive elections. It's now just over 35%. We have seen an erosion of commitment among the individual political parties to 50-50 or women-only short lists or various other mechanisms that were used to promote women. Now the governing party in minority, the Scottish National Party, does have a number of women MSPs, and a number of those women are in the cabinet, which of course is to be welcomed even at the superficial level perhaps, all popular recognition of women in government. The SNP certainly would score highly there, and certainly more highly than on their selection processes and the promotion of women in the party. But that's a separate point.
As to whether women's presence makes a difference, I think that's a moot point in the experience of the Scottish Parliament. There has been a clear contribution by women MSPs. I personally believe some policy agendas would not have been so prominent had it not been for the women there—or domestic violence and child care. A number of individual women and men have made a significant difference to the promotion of domestic violence policy and prevention strategies in Scotland.
In terms of how we try to secure measures for gender budget analysis and women moving forward and how we try to introduce some unshakeable and structural provisions, we do have a number of levers we continue to use. The founding principles of the Scottish Parliament are enormously important. They state that equal opportunities and equal access to the Parliament—participation, openness, and accountability as principles of the Parliament—all add power from the outside to those of us who are looking to use the Parliament in that way. They can be very effective measures to hold the Parliament to account. There is a statute in our mandate to the equal opportunities committee of the Parliament, so there are some structural levers there.
The Scottish Women's Budget Group has found that the measures we have sought to embed in the budgetary process have been eroded as the budget process itself has evolved and changed in shape and timing. The equality statements that were secured have disappeared. The new legislation we have across gender budgeting, the public duty to promote gender equality, requires all public authorities to produce a gender equality scheme and to assess all policies for their impact on equality.
That approach is very new, and at the moment it's showing very mixed results, both in terms of the coverage and how deeply and practised those requirements are, but also the quality of the scheme is coming out and the quality of impact assessments. One of our major complaints to the new government is that in addition to the very strange language they use around equality and an erosion there apparently of commitments to equality is the lack of an equality impact assessment of this year's budget and the lack of any apparent equality impact assessments that went into the process of creating the budget. But as Ailsa referred to, this year was an extremely truncated process, with eight weeks to formulate the budget.
There was a lot of running around by civil servants, but I don't think that's good enough. It is a legal requirement to conduct an equality impact assessment and a stated commitment in the equality strategy to equality-proof the spending plans.
I mentioned earlier that that equality strategy is to be reviewed this year. The Scottish Women's Budget Group would wish to see a robust and deliverable commitment to effective gender equality scrutiny going forward. Measures to set targets, to pick specific policy and program areas, to apply gender budget analysis to those areas, to build on situations falling under the scrutiny of parliamentary committees year on year, to call to account the civil servants, and to incorporate these mechanisms—all these are key aspects of building in gender budget analysis.